Sidewise, Side Foolish:

The Best and Worst AH Books I’ve Ever Read

While alternate history as a literary genre has been around in one form or another since God knows when, it was in the late 1960s that it began to develop into its current form; that development shifted into overdrive in the 1990s(whether or not it’s coincidental that the shift happened at the same time as the collapse of the Communist bloc, I’ll leave it up to you to judge). I got into AH books right after I began contributing to Othertimelines.com in 2002; since then, by my own very rough estimate, I’ve read at least 100-plus books with AH themes. Here now in no particular order are some of my most-- and least --favorite examples of alternate history literature....

1)Fatherland(Robert Harris)

I was originally inspired to check this one out after I saw a toned-down version of HBO’s TV adaptation of the book on one of the Boston UHF stations. I wanted to see how close the movie matched the book; much to my surprise, I eventually noticed that the movie and the book diverged from each other in a host of ways, but by then my initial motivation for reading the book had given way to fascination with the way Harris renders his alarmingly plausible vision of a Nazi- ruled Berlin 20 years after a German victory in the Second World War.

2)1901(Robert Conroy)

While Harry Turtledove(who I’ll get to later) may hold the title when it comes to multi-episode stories about alternate wars, Conroy, a semi-retired economics teacher, is-- at least in my estimation --the reigning champion in the single book division. 1901’s premise of a US- German conflict erupting over German claims to territories won by the  United States from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War is an irresistble one; his characterizations of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Theodore Roosevelt, and William McKinley are spot-on and his portrayals of the US-German war’s major battles have a fascinating "you are there" ring to them.

3)Resurrection Day(Brendan DuBois)

In the fall of 1962 the United States and Russia stood for 13 days on the threshold of global nuclear war. This mystery novel seeks to explore what might have happened if the threshold had been crossed, and for the most part succeeds brilliantly. DuBois does an especially great job of describing the devastation of a post-Soviet attack New York City and sketching the nuclear ruin inflicted on the Soviets by the United States after the missiles started flying. The only respect in which he falls flat is in his depiction of George McGovern in a brief cameo in Chapter 2; I find it hard to believe that Sen. McGovern would simply throw in the towel on rebuilding New York.

4)The Leader(Guy Walters)

Besides being one of my ten favorite AH books, this was also one of my inspirations for the series The Right Honourable Arnold Hiller, MP. This book posits the notion of Oswald Mosley becoming prime minister of Great Britain in 1937 at the height of a political crisis triggered by King Edward VIII’s refusal to abdicate the British throne. Walters manages to pull off something one might not have thought possible-- he makes the Mosley in this timeline seem even more vicious than his real-life counterpart. Walters’ hero, Captain James Armstrong, is an entertaining archetype of the classic stiff-upper-lip British officer fighting to defend the best of Britain’s traditions. There’s also a neat subplot about an NKVD spy ring with surprising ties to one of Mosley’s henchmen.

5)The Hitler Options(Kenneth J. Macksey)

In contrast to the other four books I’ve mentioned so far, Options isn’t a work of pure fiction but an academic book meant to examine certain real-life decisions by Adolf Hitler(hence the title) by depicting situations where the Führer took the opposite decision. One chapter that especially impressed me, titled "Greenbriar: Defusing The German Bomb", chronicles how the Allies might have used air power to thwart Hitler’s quest to achieve a nuclear capability; this premise in turn examines how the course of World War II might have changed if the Nazis had been more consistent in supporting their scientists’ atomic fission research.

6)Blood & Iron(Harry Turtledove)

This was the book that first turned me on to Turtledove’s Great War and American Empire series. In my estimation at least, out of the eleven such books he’s published so far, this one is the cream of the crop; its absorbing portrayal of a divided 1920s America in a timeline where the South won the American Civil War makes you think about just how narrow the Union’s triumph in the real Civil War was, and Blood’s subplot about Jake Featherston’s schemes to put his Freedom Party in control of the Confederate States offers an intriguing allegory for the rise to power of real-life fascists like Hitler and Mussolini, in particular the segments where Featherston discovers the possibilities of using radio to spread his message across the Confederacy.

7)Pavane(Keith Roberts)

One of the AH genre’s first bona fide classics. This tells a frighteningly plausible story of an England under the Inquisition’s thumb centuries after the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I and the landing of the Spanish Armada on British shores.

8)Cold War Hot(Peter G. Tsouras et. al.)

This book is in the same vein as The Hitler Options; as you may have guessed by the title, it analyze key turning points in the Cold War and how a single change at any of those points could have changed history for the better("Vietnam: The War That Nobody Noticed") or for the worse("The Pusan Disaster: North Korea’s Triumph"). Perhaps the best essay in Cold War Hot, though, is "Sino-Soviet War: Fraternal Disaster", which studies how the old Sino-Russian border dispute could have led to tactical nuclear war between the Mao and Brezhnev regimes. The second-best: a humor piece titled "Red Lightning: The Collapse of the Red Army", which imagines NATO exploiting the notorious Russian weakness for alcohol to hasten the Warsaw Pact’s downfall in 1989.

9)Last Stop Vienna(Andrew Nagorski)

An intriguing, and at times heartbreaking, account of a young Austrian’s attraction to Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal and the dramatic shift in the course of Germany’s history brought about as a result of that attraction. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that the protagonist’s reaction to Geli’s death makes for one of the most absorbing "might have beens" you’ll ever read.

10)The Man In The High Castle(Philip K. Dick)

Along with Pavane, this is one of the early classics of the AH genre. It tells the story of a man living in an America divided between the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany the same way as OTL Germany was partitioned between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union after 1945. This man is asked to write a book envisioning a world in which Japan and Germany lost the Second World War, and how he handles that assignment sheds light on the somber realities of a conquered United States.

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OK, that takes care of the cream-- now it’s time to look at the dregs. Once again, in no particular order....

1)Farthing(Jo Walton)

I wanted to like this book. God knows I did. But it was just too depressing for words. And the characterizations, let’s be frank, left a little something to be desired-- especially that of the detective who passes for a hero in this storyline. Farthing is the first book in a three-volume trilogy called "Still Life With Fascists"; neither this novel, nor its sequel Ha’penny, leave me with much hope that the final volume of the trilogy will be all that good.

2)O Greenest Branch!(Gael Baudino)

This book made about as much sense to me as a VCR instruction manual; over and over as I tried vainly to figure out the point of divergence for this novel, I felt like I’d been stranded on another planet without knowing the first thing about the language or having a clue about how to get back to Earth. When I was finally finished struggling through it I found myself saying, in the immortal words of that great modern philosopher Stewie Griffin, "WHAT THE DEUCE?!!" With most AH books, good or bad, you can at least get a vague sense of what kind of timeline the story’s set in. Branch, alas, offers no such comfort.

3)The Children’s War(J.L. Stroyer)

I would have listed this at #1, but it didn’t go south until about page 150, whereas Farthing was a disaster from the opening paragraph. That said, this novel proved a Gibraltar-sized letdown for me; I began reading it expecting it to be the Y Generation’s answer to Fatherland, but instead it turned out to be just a mishmash of low-rent melodrama, cynicism, bitterness, and third-rate tearjerking. But even that wasn’t the worst part of the whole experience-- no, what really wrecked this book for me was a credibility-blowing subplot about New York seceding from the rest of the United States after this book’s version of World War II.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s too @#%%^&! long?

4)The Confederate States Of America(Howard Means)

Another case of false advertising. Not to be confused with Roger L. Ransom’s excellent academic study Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been, this book claims to be a mystery novel set in a world where the Confederacy won the American Civil War-- but the only mystery here is how this thing ever saw print. A potentially gripping subplot about the racial dynamics of this ATL is utterly wasted, and the novel’s depiction of the North 150 years after the Civil War’s end is, to put it generously, far-fetched.

5)Elvis & Nixon(Jonathan Lowy)

May lightning strike me dead if I even consider reading this overripe nonsense again. The author may have gotten Nixon right, but he botched everything else about his storyline to a fare-thee-well; his portrayal of Elvis holding the president at gunpoint late in the book is particularly ludicrous.

6)Swastika Night(Katherine Burdekin)

A humorless anti-male diatribe posing as a cautionary tale about the consequences of extended Nazi rule in Germany. Even Germaine Greer would be embarrassed by the extreme levels of male-bashing Burdekin indulges in here. Nor does Ms. Burdekin do her literary reputation any favors with her less-than-interesting depiction of the chain of events which spawned the global Nazi state in which her book is set.

7)Lurid Dreams(Charles L. Harness)

Once again, a potentially great premise-- a 21^st century scientist uses astral projection to see how changing one or two decisions in the life of Edgar Allan Poe might have altered American history --ends up being wrecked by dirt-poor execution. The real American Civil War was ended in less time than it takes for the reader to drum up interest in this book’s characters or the world they inhabit.

8)The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds Of Virginia(Rudy Rucker)

This novel aspires to be another Journey To The Center Of The Earth but can’t even manage to reach the level of The Cave. There may be a way to make a book about Edgar Allan Poe visiting the earth’s interior work-- but trust me, this ain’t it. And the supporting cast in Hollow Earth is so bland they’re practically invisible. Don’t even get me started on the incomprehensible ending...

9)The World Next Door(Brad Ferguson)

....and speaking of incomprehensible, am I the only one who has problems making head or tail of the storyline for this book about a doorway between this Earth and a parallel one where the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into World War III? The author jumps back and forth between universes so often and so abruptly that after a while, you’ll need a GPS to keep up. And the ending, while I won’t go into details about it here, will leave you feeling utterly cheated and depressed.

10)Milton In America(Peter Ackroyd)

Like Lurid Dreams, Farthing, and Confederate States of America, this book is an example of a great premise shot to hell by a dismal execution. The premise here is that John Milton pulls up stakes and re-settles in the New World after political unrest forces him to flee England; you’d like to think, wouldn’t you, that Ackroyd would give us a portrayal of Milton worthy of Milton’s literary and intellectual brilliance? But no, he turns the celebrated author into a 17^th-century Stalin, depicting him as the harsh and deranged absolute ruler of a New England colony which by the end of the book has gotten involved in a vicious turf war with its more democratic and tolerant neighbor. The real Milton must be doing barrel rolls in his grave over the way Ackroyd renders him in this book.

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And that concludes my reviews of my ten most and least favorite AH books. Agree with my comments? Disagree? Or just wonder what on earth "sidewise" means? Feel free to e-mail me with your own comments at ChrisO_01801@yahoo.com or beacon92@hotmail.com. If you happen to know of any hidden treasures I should check out, or want to warn me about crudfests I should avoid at all costs, I’d like to hear from you.

The End